


Forest for the Trees

by AlexSeanchai (EllieMurasaki)



Category: Windy Day - Oh My Girl (Music Video)
Genre: Disabled Character of Color, F/F, LGBTQ Female Character of Color
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-16
Updated: 2017-04-16
Packaged: 2018-10-19 13:32:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10640841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllieMurasaki/pseuds/AlexSeanchai
Summary: Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Any way the wind blows...





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [awildneko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/awildneko/gifts).



Iseul first sees the path when her mind is on Mi-suk’s beauty. She notices the footprints on the earth between the trees at the edge of the meadow, yes, but only because she thought she saw Mi-suk herself standing there.

And—there are so many things Iseul should be doing. It’s one thing to come wander the meadow alone in search of fresh air and sunshine and golden dandelions, exercise and the feeling of wind in her hair. But she is juggling a lot of balls in the air and she dares not drop a one. She dares not risk her employer’s disappointment, Hyeon-ju’s argument, Mi-suk’s abandonment.

(How plausible any of these are—well, Hyeon-ju would say herself they’re not. Mi-suk—though she has never seen Iseul's poetry, and that might change her mind—would agree. Iseul is not very good at listening.)

Mi-suk isn’t standing there anymore, if ever she was at all. But Iseul has a few words to say to Mi-suk, words echoed in poems Iseul has written, if only Iseul can persuade the words to leave her lips.

Iseul sets foot on the path.

* * *

The bones of a rodent crunch under the heel of Iseul’s shoe; dirt and grass have stained the black leather.

She’s seeing, from the corners of her eyes, people—young women, several of them—who, when she turns to look at them full on, are never there at all. Iseul, heart racing, isn’t sure what to think—fairies, ghosts, monsters, or simply tricks of the light?

If fairies or monsters, it’s a gamble just to stay in the shadow of the trees instead of fleeing. With ghosts, a roll of the dice: why did each such spirit stay? Do they see Iseul as friend or prey or no one worth noticing at all?

(They tell stories of fairies, and ghosts, and monsters. To be trapped for a single night that lasts a hundred years, far from Mi-suk and Hyeon-ju till long after they die, is the _pleasant_ outcome.)

If mere tricks of the light…if simply the wind shaking trees, shaping leaves, carrying the scent of coriander…it’s awfully eerie, here among these trees, but she does not see the path back to the meadow.

What if, whispers Iseul’s mind: what if the worst of these is the thing that’s true?

* * *

Iseul hasn’t spoken today since she left her home: she does not, today, have the energy to play the polite social game. Now—she thinks, again, that Mi-suk is here, just a little out of sight—she takes a chance: “Mi-suk?”

A deer startles: leaps away. She hadn’t seen it.

Iseul walks on.

And pauses. That trick of the light was distinctly _blonde_ , where all the other ghost-fairy-monster-tricks were as black-haired as Iseul herself. And there’s a feel to the breeze, nothing she is able to identify with scientific precision, but it feels friendly, like a sister—

(She has always been good with mathematics. Sister plus blonde equals…?)

Aloud, she says, “Hyeon-ju?”

And she glimpses, again, Mi-suk.

* * *

A hedge maze in darkness. Iseul isn’t sure how she got here from the shade of trees in daylight. She has a light in her hand, but it shows her only hedge and path.

Something’s whirring, a sound sometimes low and sometimes shrill, not unlike the humming of her spinning wheel—and yet not like at all. It convinces her between two heartbeats, with the fervency of one proclaiming her love to her first lover, of two resounding truths at once:

At the heart of the maze lies a treasure.

In the depths of the maze waits a monster.

She runs.

* * *

Sweat stings in her eyes. How long has she been running, deer-like, through the meadow, through the hedge maze, through the shadows, through the trees? How long can she run still?

Petals on the wind whisper _hello, hello_. It’s not Mi-suk’s voice, nor Hyeon-ju’s.

How long can she run? No water, and a head spinning like a pinwheel in the wind: she clings to a tree against the furious gust so that she won’t fall over, because if she succumbs to the dizziness she won’t get up again. She knows that like she knows her name.

What _is_ her name?

* * *

Rattled.

She is dancing in the meadow—not alone—eight girls and she is one—eight ghosts all garbed in white. She knows no choreography, and yet in their dance they never hesitate, never misstep, never tread on a dandelion, moving to the beat of the clack of her loom.

Wasn’t she wearing red? A longer dress than this, and a headband…

Two girls at tea at table, white hats on both their heads, to protect their pale complexions from the sun, in the midst—the mist—of all these trees. One might shoot the hat off one head, had one the aim and weapon. She points a finger like a gun, closes her left eye to better sight with the other—

A gust of wind blows off one hat; she drops the gun and runs.

* * *

(Mi-suk has had the power, since very soon after they met, to persuade anything Mi-suk likes out of her. Mi-suk seems unaware of this, and it is not as though she hasn’t asked friendly favors in return that Mi-suk seems perfectly willing to fulfill, but the favors Mi-suk has asked of her are several. In fact the thing she was working on when she paused in her task to come to the meadow—fresh air and sunshine and golden dandelions, exercise and the feeling of wind in her hair—was the budget for a project that Mi-suk needed to crowdfund before beginning.)

(She owes so much to Hyeon-ju. Hyeon-ju has so often told her when her anxiety is telling lies. She has often told Hyeon-ju when Hyeon-ju’s depression does the same: the books are balanced, but still bound.)

* * *

The wind brings pain. It sears her every motion and it pounds within her head. She is that deer she startled; she has been shot by that gun she dropped. She is wool she’s drafting for the spindle.

 _Sister_ leaves her, a tuft of wool taken on the breeze. _Daughter_ , _granddaughter_ , _niece_ follow: scraps of identity of no importance. She snatches at _Korean_ ; she lets _receptionist_ slip through her fingers. _Good with numbers_ wafts off, and _poor calligraphy_.

 _Singer_ she grabs for. _Queer_ she grabs for. _Spinner_ took too much work to gain it for her; she will not let it go. _Disabled_ she fought too hard to claim, to reclaim; she will not let it go.

 _Poet_ she clings to with a drowning desperation for air.

Coriander and dandelions grow from seeds. She scatters seeds on the earth: _poet_ and _disabled_ and _spinner_ , _singer_ and _queer_ and _Korean_.

Dandelions grow wherever they have a mind to: _Korean_ and _queer_ and _disabled_ are that sort of seed. Coriander, _spinner_ and _singer_ and _poet_ , such seeds take more careful tending: full sun, rich soil that’s never dry, a deep wide pot so the plants have room to grow even in the confines of her home.

Perhaps she’ll add _gardener_. Perhaps she’ll add _dancer_. And _threader of the labyrinth_ and _wanderer of the woods_ : these are hers now, these are _her_.

 _Poet_ she plants again and again.

* * *

In the mirror at the heart of the maze stands a woman, red-gowned, with a red headband bright against her long black hair. Mist rises behind her, blurring out the lines of trees.

This was never about Mi-suk, nor Hyeon-ju, nor any other person in her world; she is not their puppet and she never was. She may act as though her paycheck job can pull her strings; she may confine her behavior to what the local law permits and what the local norms allow.

She may. Or she may not. As she chooses— _she_ and she alone.

Now she is herself.

(Now, though that was not the point, she will tell Hyeon-ju how much her friendship means; now she is not afraid of losing that friendship by narrowing it to a handful of words. Now, though that was not the point, she will tell Mi-suk how much poetry she has written the last few years, and some of why; perhaps show Mi-suk some of these snapshots of what she felt about Mi-suk. She must write a new poem today to join the rest, and if she still cannot speak the words, then still Mi-suk will _know_. And what will happen next will happen.)

Iseul leaves the maze, the trees, the meadow. This way to home.


End file.
